This invention relates to harvesting vine type fruit crops, and more particularly to a novel grapevine stabilizer attachment for grape harvesters arranged to prevent the shaking mechanism acting on a particular portion of a vine row from inadvertently shaking fruit from adjacent vines disposed in the row forwardly of the shaking mechanism.
It is conventional in vineyards, for example, to harvest grapes by shaking or gently beating the vines in order to cause the fruit to fall. Harvesting machines have been developed which straddle a row of vines, with shaker mechanism, and effectively shake them as the machine maneuvers along the length of the row. The grapes, after being dislodged from the vine, fall onto conveyors positioned beneath the vine and are thence transported to grape collection bins. U.S. Pat. No. 4,418,521 is illustrative of such vine crop harvesters.
However, in the harvesting of grapes it has heretofore been an inherent characteristic of such machinery that the shaking of vines to dislodge the fruit also causes adjacent vines in the same row but forwardly of the shaking mechanism, to shake as well, losing a portion of their fruit prematurely. Since the harvester is not arranged to catch fruit falling from vines in front of the ones actually being harvested, a sizable portion of the crop is lost to waste. It is not uncommon for a farmer to lose as much as 30% of an annual crop in this manner under severe cold weather condition.